Why do we obey morals? or What is morals?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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[First time posting a topic, makes me feel smart :wink: j/k]

I was writing up an essay the other day for Phil class. The topic was an attempt to define what we know as morals. but like all my essays so far, it seemed to start from one point, and ended up in a totally different position.

anyways… during my brainstorming and draft process, this is what i came up with: that morals are somehow a previously known boundary (before birth or within human nature) set to guide, not force, our everyday actions. However, there must be such a thing, which makes us perffer to stay contained within this boundary. This thing, i suppose is the guilt of committing a moral crime.

Countless time we would say how regretful we were after lying, cheating on someone; or running away in fear when a friend was in danger. all these actions are morally wrong, and the regret feeling afterwards leads towards guilt.

Assuming that people don’t want negative feelings, for no sane person would, trying to avoid that feeling consiously or unconsiously is what makes us obey to the morals of life.

okay, i hope im making sense so far. now, here are the questions:

if one was never to do something morally wrong, how would one know this negative, regretful, guilty feeling? does that mean, in order for us to find the moral boundary, we must have crossed it before? If so, then consider this, once we have lied, it is so much easier to lie again. somehow, the guilt feeling has lessened after one performed the morally wrong action. how come the guilt feeling is greater even before we have ever committed the crime to feel it? because appearently, we would never know this guilt feeling.

this is where i kind of lost myself and went to bed. in the end, it seemed like question just went around in a circle and is now contradicting itself.

~GoneFishing

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I think you are raising interesting points about morals. Oftentimes, I see discussions on morality/morals on theoretical analysis—relative versus objective. But here, you are analyzing it based on subjective feeling of guilt. So, first in your question—should we have committed an immoral act to know the guilty feeling that accompanies the knowing that we have committed it? Well, not necessarily. What I think happens is we are conditioned/instructed about moralities (right and wrong thing to do, such as cheating, lying, stealing, murder) early on, and this learning is accompanied by our observations of consequences/sanctions within our family and in our society/institutions. So, we know, approximately, the feeling when we see others cross this “boundary” and suffer consequences as a result of his/her actions. I think guilt stops us, for the most part, from committing “immoral acts”. The feeling of remorse afterwards is a result of the presence of guilt to begin with.

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see, i dont think morals are taught through society or family, its just one way to find the morals that were already within us. im saying this on my idea that morals are within us, not shaped by others.

Committing murder, no matter today, 2000 years ago, in a democracy country, in a communism country, it was always a crime. Somehow, within us there is this common moral.

So if that is true, then the so called boundary i was talking about before is something we all have in common, maybe some “truth” lying within us? (just a thought)

Now, like any boundary, one can easily walk across it, back and forth. So what is it to stop us from doing so, since it is better in our inhereted “truth’s” opinion to stay inside it? That is what I was trying to answer? What stops us, or stops majority of us, from committing moral crimes?

Since it is that morals are within all of us, then we would not need to observe the consequence of others to know what is wrong, because we already know it somehow from heart.

But like my starting post, is it guilt that trys to contain us in the boundary? it seems like so, then how would we know acting so would result in guilty, remorseful feeling, if we have never crossed the boundary to experienced it? does this mean, finding out where the boundary is, what the moral is, we need to cross it back and forth to slowly map it out?

so are we all providing to the society some feedback when we vote on things such as abortion (just an example, plz dont start discussion on abortion), helping to clearly map out the moral that lies within us?

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GoneFishing,

You might enjoy reading the 1912 essay by H. A. Pritchard “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake”, which concludes:

“Or, to put the matter generally, if we do doubt whether there is really an obligation to originate A in a situation B, the remedy lies not in any process of general thinking, but in getting face to face with a particular instance of the situation B, and then directly appreciating the obligation to originate A in that situation.”

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think you are raising interesting points about morals. Oftentimes, I see discussions on morality/morals on theoretical analysis—relative versus objective. But here, you are analyzing it based on subjective feeling of guilt. So, first in your question—should we have committed an immoral act to know the guilty feeling that accompanies the knowing that we have committed it? Well, not necessarily. What I think happens is we are conditioned/instructed about moralities (right and wrong thing to do, such as cheating, lying, stealing, murder) early on, and this learning is accompanied by our observations of consequences/sanctions within our family and in our society/institutions. So, we know, approximately, the feeling when we see others cross this “boundary” and suffer consequences as a result of his/her actions. I think guilt stops us, for the most part, from committing “immoral acts”. The feeling of remorse afterwards is a result of the presence of guilt to begin with.

Ah, but where else does those subjective feelings of guilt come from other than from society & culture? In addition, I have met several such people who’s feeling of guilt are either non-exsistent or so weak that they do not prevent the person from commiting some horrible acts of immoralness.

Guilt, to me, is a sticky topic. We all do certain things that cause us to feel guilt, but each of us also has the ability to commit certain “sins”, and not feel guilt about doing it. For me, I could not lie to my parents without feeling terribly guilty. Perhaps many of you, though, could easily lie to a close friend or spouse, and not feel any remorse for doing so.

Just my mundane babblings of guilt…but, indeed, interesting topics :wink:

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What about the pleasure from doing the right thing?

The sense of accomplishment, the swelling of pride, the feeling of righteousness?

Guilt is not the only emotion related to our conscience.

Guilt originates in our dread of future punishment. We fear the terrible retribution for our wicked deeds. It’s a social emotion, influenced greatly by our childhood caregivers and their parenting style.

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i think in order to talk about the meaning of guilt you cant just say ‘it came from how our parents raised us’ because who told them? i think the invention of guilt (and all of ‘love-humans-equally’ morality)happened when somebody accidentaly hurt somebody they cared about. a caveman dropped a rock carelessly and it landed on his wife who cried and he was naturally there for her, ready to kill the jerk who just dropped a rock on her. when he discovered it was himself who caused such badness and not some evil animal type completely worthy of desctruction, morality was invented.

before somebody accidentally hurt their wife, they figured that anything bad that happened was caused by nature, and nature could be controlled and murdered at will. killing an animal wasnt the same as killing a human because you dont talk/grunt with an animal and become friends with it. and for the same reason, they felt no need to equate neighboring cavemen with family/tribe members.

as soon as they realized that they could create bad, they realized that they had a reason to slightly hurt themselves so that others may be rewarded more greatly. and by ‘slightly hurt’ i mean they found a reason to not kill their neighbors and steal their stuff. cause boy wouldnt it be great to have all the stuff that your neighbors had? its not like their tears hurt you or their blood will poison your food, so what reason could you possibly have for not murdering them? it could have been your wife, and by the same measure, could have been you. thats the basis for real altruistic morality, it could have been you, and a smile is a smile whether or not its on your head.

i think this is gods will because it feels so damn good when you put a smile on somebody elses face. honestly, you could give yourself five bucks and buy lots of yummy candy and smile at it, or you could give it to a bum whose face will light up and dance around at the prospect of a whole hour of crack bliss. and thats the worst, crappiest kind of charity possible. it only gets better from there.

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Future Man:

would we say that lying is an immoral action? But in order to put a smile one someone’s face, have we not lied before? I certainly have done so, and assuming i am just normal, i bet many others have. so, to do somethign morally right, we do it by doing something else that is morally wrong. is that the case? because i am definitely confusing myself right here.

“I think this is gods will because it feels so damn good when you put a smile on somebody elses face.”

yeah, i really don’t like the idea of God. every time a argument starts it ends up God is the winner because he was ultimately better in the first place, which was only defined by our “mere” human intelligence.

anyways…

i do agree that these feeling and emotions inside all of us dont’ just come from our parents. I would say that parenting style and childhood might have brought out the emotions to different degrees, thus causing everyone to have different moral standards. even so, these morals, they were there to begin with.

I guess my question is what kind of mysterious force is this that tries to prevent us from breaking our own moral rules? And why once lied, it is easier to lie the second time? why does this “force” lessen?

I thought that guilt was one thing that prevented us from committing such crimes. but now you brought up pleasure in pleasing another. maybe its a combination of both that lets us make up the decision to perform a morally right action.

Then is it the action of judging what is more benificial to myself, since i want to avoid negative feelings and experience the pleasure of pleasing someone, this thinking process be what is stopping us from making the wrong moral choice. Can we somehow define this action in a better way than my incoherent english?

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while I think that all men find at least some form of satisfaction—even if almost subconscience (I say this because we still get the good feeling of doing right—even if we hate doing the specific task or duty)— from doing what we percieve to be right.

Often times, we even get satisfaction from doing what may seem to us to be the right thing or choice—even if what we thought was right & best actually turns out to be something undesirable (i.e. making decisions to pass a proposal at work, without first getting the bosses’ approval, etc.).

To me, I personally believe guilt is the result of Me being a Christian. According to the Christian beilef, “wrong” things are called sin. And a Christian will feel guilt for doing sin----even if the unsaved person does the same sin and feels no guilt.

But, of course, this is whole other topic in and of itself…:wink:

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I would like to say there’s a difference between the guilt one feels for doing something that hurts others, and the abject despair one is saddled with by certain religions for the crime of existing. They seem to be different facets of the same basic emotion, however; the main difference seems to be that the one is impermanent and in principle forgivable, whereas the other is eternal and inexpiable - no human being is allowed to say that he has no need to feel guilty for having certain thoughts, only his god can do that, and not because of any penalty paid or good works accomplished, but out of the goodness of his heart for someone who does not and cannot deserve it.

That said, I will now discuss the first kind - actual guilt for actual deeds that actually harm people in some fashion. There is something to be said for the notion that human beings do not have an innate moral sense. That is, people do not automatically feel bad when they do things that hurt other people. However, they do feel bad when they do things that hurt people (pets, gardens, trees, art, etc.) about which they care. Future Man’s caveman is an excellent example.

The role of parental teaching comes in to educate the child about normative considerations - whom you should care about, the categories of things and people about which you should feel bad when you hurt them. Also education as to the various ways in which certain actions are capable of harming others even if you don’t intend them to.

The mixing I talked about above, the religious usurpation of humanity’s social glue of guilt over harm done to esteemed others, comes in when the priestly class instructs and indoctrinates people to feel bad over deeds that harm no person and thoughts that one never shares with people who might be harmed by them.

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i think lying is a very interesting facet of morality. i tend to base morality on the results, not pointless dogmas. obviously, telling your wife that her butt does not look so big is a lie you better tell if you want the world to be a happy place, but what about when your parents ask if you are high?

id lie at that point, because i look at the two possible outcomes. if i tell the truth, there will be yelling and punishment and i will still smoke pot and grow up just fine. if i dont tell them, i will still smoke pot and grow up just fine and no parental anger.

the only problem (with any kind of moral abiguity) is that me and my parents dont agree on what decision will yield the best results. they see punishment as a way to curtail my pot smoking and they see that as a thing that will result in a better grown up at the end of the line. i see it as no more than a disruption with no results.

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Future Man,

Yes, often when we practice morality, we look at the situation itself to justify how we act. And I think in this regard, morality as practiced is often relative, rather than objective. Would you agree then, that morality has both a relative and objective notions? Such as, there are acts that pretty much the entire humanity would agree to be immoral at any situation, any time–for example, genocide. And then there are acts that can be judged on a case by case basis.

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arendt,

i totally agree with you. that is i why i feel people across different races and culture still tend to agree upon something that is just immoral. So, then i think that there is some connectino between all humans, seemingly this connection has a lot less to do of how we grew up, but more to do with the instant before we were born.

then i thought there is something called “universal moral” where it is exactly the things all people agree to be absolutely wrong, and “unique moral” where everyone takes some morals to a different degree of seriousness.

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I was not saying that guilt ORIGINATES in our relationship with our childhood guardians. I am saying that our sense of guilt gets greatly influenced by them.

The origins of guilt go much further back. Back to the beginning of social behaviors in mammals. Even your dog knows when you yell at her to bow her head in the right pose that indicates guilt and look up at you with her big puppy eyes. Her submission behavior gets your compassionate response and all is forgiven.

When animals work as teams, hunting as a pack, they need to find ways to work together. We have inherited those team working behaviors, including hierarchies, submission and domination behaviors.

Our emotions come from our bodies. Our glands, our chemistry and our brains produce our emotions. All people have highly similar bodies, and so we have the same kind of emotions. For thousands of years people have all been feeling, love, hate, fear, lust, sorrow, joy and guilt.

The way we relate to other humans based on the fact that we are all embodied. We are minds in bodies dealing with other minds in bodies.

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I second xanderman’s post. Excellent.

I have been in other discussions about the existence of moral heirarchies and how/if they differ from moral relativism. It seems to me now that both are reasonable and are not mutually exclusive. A moral heirarchy, whether the morals within are levels of absolutes or are relative, is a human construct that is born of our collective sociobiological heritage. In order to establish a set of absolute morals for the present day, we must consider that even though we are all so very similar biologically, we have evolved psychologically to a point where we are questioning everything our instinct tells us, which I think is a revolutionary idea. From that, we have gained the ability to speculate about moral values and absolutism/relativism, and I suspect that this art of speculation is so new and raw that if a sample of people could be left completely isolated from cultural influence, it would not be uncommon to find individuals within that group with very nearly identical body/brain chemistry who have nevertheless come up with slightly different moral systems. Because of this, it is very difficult for modern humanity to lay down broad moral codes that don’t cause great conflict. The most basic prohibitions, such as those against murder, theft, lying, etc., must be interpreted as relative in order to apply them reasonably to the inconsistency of humanity. When they are seen as absolute, conflict is all but inevitable, and that is one reason why there is so much religious/ethnic strife in the world.

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That’s a better way of putting it.

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Try shooting a bird with 1 bullet. You will miss several hundred times but you can only get better at it the more you try/do it. Same for everything isn’t it? Older men are wiser?

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If you want to cure all the religious/ethnic strife in the world, simply teach people not to see such strife as a bad thing. For once all these conflicts are no longer seen as morally problematic, they will no longer be morally problematic, and hence the world will become a more upright and perfect place. Similarly, think of how much better the world would be, if we no longer viewed murder, rape, or genocide as moral wrongs- thereby they would no longer be moral wrongs.

Right?

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There are some patterns in morality. I cannot think of any known society where murder is taken for granted. There are always restrictions on murder.

The situation always plays a role too. Take for instance the story that a man fatally shot another man. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Or story Two: A white man fatally shot a black man. Now its a whole different story. Was it a good thing or a bad thing?

Story Three: A white man who was a soldier fatally shot a black soldier during a battle. Could be good or bad, depening on which side you were on.

Story Four: A white man who was a soldier fatally shot a black soldier, who was his superior officer, during a battle.

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depends on the perceived outcome of the perpetrator aka his intent.

self defense or defense of others- obviously ok

white man convinced black deaths will purify america- based on bad information and can be remedied.

one side of an army wins the war- whats that armies intentions? i think we can safely say that if world equality is a good goal, then only one side of ww2 was “good”

if the superior officer is a dumbass, is causing irreversible harm that is “worse” than his own death, and he refuses to listen to anything but bullets, give him some bullets.

if you assume world equality is the real good goal, all actions can be judged morally based on their intent as either evil, good or lacking correct information.